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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Laurie Sheck

1953- ,
Bronx ,
NY, United States

On July 10, 1953, Laurie Sheck was born in the Bronx, New York. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Captivity (Knopf, 2007), which interacts, in part, with the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Black Series (2001); The Willow Grove (1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Io at Night (1990); and Amaranth (1981).

She is also the editor of the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (Zoland, 2003), and the author of the hybrid work A Monster's Notes (Knopf, 2009), which re-examines the un-named monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Her poems have been included in two volumes of Best American Poetry and three volumes of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

About Sheck's work, the poet C. K. Williams has said, "Rarely, if ever, has the contemporary lyric been both so pure and so informed with varieties of experience." The poet Rita Dove has said, "Laurie Sheck is a modern shaman...'Listen carefully.' she whispers; and you do, because your life depends on it."

Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Laurie Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, and currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at the New School. She lives in New York City.

by this poet

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
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